US tortures Afghan, presumed innocent, to death

German ministers 'knew about CIA torture cells'

The Independent
25 October 2006

The German government is alleged to have received first-hand evidence that the CIA began torturing terrorist suspects at secret prisons in Europe shortly after the September 11 attacks, despite claiming it only knew about such sites through the media. [..]

Stern magazine quoted a leaked German intelligence report yesterday which said that only weeks after September 11 2001, two agents and a translator visited a US military prison at the American "Eagle Base" in the Bosnian town of Tuzla, where they saw a torture victim.

The German intelligence report said US interrogators at the base had beaten a 70-year-old terrorist suspect with rifle butts and that "his injuries meant that he had to be given 20 stitches to the head wound he sustained". The report said the American interrogator responsible "appeared to be proud" of his actions.

Stern said the German intelligence agents had been given access to documents confiscated by the Americans which were "smeared with blood". One German agent was said to have compared the actions of the US interrogators to Serbian war criminals during the break up of Yugoslavia. "The Serbs ended up before the international court in The Hague for this kind of thing," he was quoted as saying.

The two German agents and their translator had been asked to appear at the base to help the Americans interrogate suspects and help evaluate confiscated material. But according to the leaked report, they immediately informed Germany's federal prosecutor of what they had witnessed and left the base shortly afterwards. [..]

Stern said that German intelligence, the country's Federal Criminal Bureau and German military intelligence had all been informed about the agents' visit to "Eagle Base". All three agencies refused to comment on the Stern report yesterday.

Germany was heavily criticised last year for allowing CIA prisoner rendition flights to stop over in the country. The German parliament is currently considering opening an investigation into allegations by a former terrorist suspect held prisoner by the US in Afghanistan that German special forces assisted in his interrogation.

Jose, victim of a sinister new America

Among all homicides, at least 11 involved blunt trauma or asphyxiation. At least 3 homicide cases have resulted in murder charges and 3 resulted in voluntary manslaughter charges.

For the 12 homicide cases for which final autopsy reports are available, gunshot wounds accounted for 4 of the deaths. The remaining 8 homicides were due to: (1) pulmonary embolism due to blunt trauma; (2) blunt force injuries complicating coronary disease; (3) strangulation; (4) blunt force with rhabdomyolysis; (5) cortical brain contusion and subdural hematoma; (6) blunt force with compromised respiration; (7) asphyxia due to chest compression and smothering; and (8) asphyxia due to occlusion of the airway and blunt force injuries...

According to a review conducted by Human Rights First, at least 11 detainee deaths may have been due in part or in whole to physical abuse or harsh conditions of confinement. They further concluded that at least 8 detainees in US custody were tortured to death. Steven Miles, reporting in this journal, put the number of deaths due to torture at 17, with 11 cases occurring in Iraq and 6 occurring in Afghanistan. Many of these deaths involved torture or abuse related to harsh interrogations of the detainees by US personnel.

Canada: Suspect tortured despite warning

Associated Press
Tue Dec 5, 7:24 PM ET

Canadian police said Tuesday they had told U.S. authorities they had no evidence an Ottawa software engineer was an al-Qaida agent before Washington deported him to Syria, where he was tortured.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said police initially told U.S. authorities Syrian-born Maher Arar was a "man of interest" and may have ties to Islamic extremists but they later told Washington they had no evidence to support those allegations.

Yet U.S. authorities went ahead and deported Arar to his native Syria, where he says he was tortured into making false confessions, Zaccardelli told a public security hearing in the capital Ottawa.

"RCMP investigators clearly informed U.S. officials that there was no evidence to support criminal charges against Mr. Arar in Canada, that he could not be prevented from entering Canada, and that we were unable to link him to al-Qaida," Zaccardelli said.

The 34-year-old Arar was traveling on a Canadian passport in 2002 when he was detained at New York's Kennedy Airport during a stopover on his way home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Without informing Canada, the U.S. government turned Arar over to Syria where he was tortured, tossed in a small cell and finally released after nearly a year of confinement.

After his release from a Damascus prison in 2003, Arar made detailed allegations about whippings with electrical cables and Canadian authorities determined his account was credible.

Arar was exonerated of all suspicion of terrorist activity in September by a Canadian government commission. [..]

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last month demanded a formal apology from the White House, saying Arar had been unfairly deported to face torture in Syria and that American officials "had not been candid and truthful" in dealing with Canadian authorities. [..]

In September, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said "the people who made the decisions at the time ... determined a couple of things: One, that this individual posed a threat to the United States based on the information that they had; and two, that they were able to assure themselves, they had the reasonable expectation that this individual was not going to be maltreated."

A short time ago, in Germany, I spoke with one of the senior advisors of Chancellor Angela Merkel. I noted that a criminal complaint had been filed against Donald Rumsfeld and a number of others invoking universal jurisdiction for war crimes offenses. How would the chancellor see this, I asked? There was a long pause, and I fully expected to get a brush-off response. But what came was very surprising.

"You must remember," said the advisor, "that my chancellor was born and raised in a totalitarian state. She cannot be indifferent to questions of this sort. In fact, she views them as matters of the utmost gravity and they will be treated that way. The Nuremberg process happened in my country. It was painful for us. But we absorbed it. It became a part of our legacy. An important part of our legacy. We will not forget it. But I have to ask you: why has your country forgotten?"

They "had the reasonable expectation that this individual was not going to be maltreated"? In a cell of Syrian dictator Assad? Are they f*cking serious? Do they even expect anyone to take them seriously?

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military's maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man's cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon's detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

Hicks [..] was visited over two days last week at Camp 5 by his Pentagon-appointed military defence lawyer, Major Michael Mori, [who]said from Washington yesterday[,] "I honestly don't know how David has lasted as long as he has."

Major Mori said Hicks was still being held in solitary confinement for 22 to 23 hours a day and could walk no more than 10 paces in any direction [..]

Major Michael Mori, who said Hicks was confined in a one-person cell for 23 hours a day, could not leave for meals and was allowed an hour a day in a "reading room without any books".

The US military has prevented a senior Melbourne psychiatrist from visiting David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay to provide an independent mental health assessment for his legal team. [T]he US Administration [refused] to allow Professor Mullen to make a follow-up assessment of Hicks.

[David Hicks' US military lawyer] Major Mori said he was given no reason for the refusal, which conflicts with a policy made two years ago allowing Professor Mullen to visit Hicks.

The woman appointed [..] director of military prosecutions to the new Australian Military Court has described the treatment of David Hicks as abominable.

[..] Asked about the treatment of Mr Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years and is not currently charged with any offences, she did not hesitate. "Abominable," she said. "Quite frankly, I think it's wrong. I don't care what he's done or alleged to have done. I think he's entitled to a trial and a fair one [..]

Padilla spent 1,307 days at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., where, his lawyers allege, he was kept in solitary, deprived of sleep, drugged with PCP or LSD, held in stress positions, and blindfolded, shackled and deafened on the few occasions he was allowed out of his 9-by-7-foot cell.

"Today is May 21," a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. "Right now we're ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant."

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla's bare feet slid through [..]. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla's legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla's cuffed hands to a metal belt. [H]e lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

[..] Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla's electronic court file late Friday.

The abuse Padilla has endured while in custody, [his lawyers] contend, has [..] rendered [him] incompetent to stand trial.

The logic of the federal government's response to the defense motion was stunningly cold. The U.S. Attorney's office agrees that Padilla needs his competency evaluated. We didn't torture him, argue the representatives of the U.S. government, but if we did, and it made him crazy -- well, then, no claims he makes about said torture can be trusted. He is, after all, mentally incompetent.

Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University who specializes in constitutional criminal procedure, calls this argument "bizarre."

"It would create a rather perverse incentive [..] As long as the government can force someone into mental incompetency they cannot face a motion for incompetency in court."

"It would seem," concludes Turley, with great understatement, "to invite abuse."

this NPR report on Jose Padilla is easily one of the more disturbing things I've read all day. Padilla, as we've learned, has basically gone insane during his time in U.S. military custody, after four years of stress positions and "total sensory deprivation." But here's the government's defense:

The government maintains that whatever happened to Padilla during his detention is irrelevant, since no information obtained during that time is being used in the criminal case against him.

Er... so there was real no point in holding him indefinitely, without charges? Is that what's being said here? Not exactly:

Indeed, there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, "[i]the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person[/i]."

Digby points out that the Soviet Union had a term for this: Psikhushka, psychiatric hospitals, which were used to "isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally." [..] As with Padilla, the objective was always to incapacitate the person. But hey, comparing U.S. policy with Soviet Russia is overly shrill [..].

JUST DON'T BLOG ABOUT IT:

There's plenty that's appalling in today's front-page New York Times story, about a U.S. military vet working as a whistleblower for the FBI who got picked up mistakenly, tossed in a cell and blasted with fluorescent lights and heavy-metal music, and detained for three months on "secret" charges without being allowed an attorney. But even given the context, I thought this passage at the end stuck out:

On his way out, Mr. Vance said: "They asked me if I was intending to write a book, would I talk to the press, would I be thinking of getting an attorney. I took it as, 'Shut up, don't talk about this place,' and I kept saying, 'No sir, I want to go home.'"

That's awfully similar to what happened in this story, posted last week, about an air traveler mistakenly detained by the FBI for a brief while (in fairness, this story isn't nearly as gruesome):

Finally, the agents had earlier asked that, as a favor, I would not write about this experience; I told them there were plenty of other things of this type online, but assured them I wouldn't refer to their names of course and they seemed okay with that reply.

Is this the standard end-of-detention send-off these days? Why, if these officials aren't doing anything wrong, do you suppose they'd be so nervous about being written about?

--Bradford Plumer

A German court has issued arrest warrants for 13 people, thought to be CIA agents, suspected of organising the abduction of a man mistaken for a terrorist.

Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld, a prosecutor from Munich, said that the warrants were issued in connection with the so-called "extraordinary rendition" of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who claims he was kidnapped by US agents on the Macedonian border in 2003.

The case of Mr al-Masri is the best known of several individual allegations against the CIA, which is accused by human rights campaigners of secretly ferrying hundreds of terrorism suspects to detention facilities around the world, often in countries where torture is routine.

In a lawsuit filed against the CIA and three aviation companies allegedly used by the agency, Mr al-Masri said that he was arrested on the border of Serbia and Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He is believed to have been mistaken for an al Qaeda suspect with a similar name.

According to his account, Mr al-Masri was then handed over to US agents who stripped, drugged and chained him to the floor of a private Boeing 737 jet which flew him to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned without charge in a detention facility near Kabul for four months. He was released on an Albanian hillside in May 2004 when the CIA realised its mistake, he claims.

The case has brought a diplomatic chill to the generally warm relationship between the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Bush Administration. In late 2005, Ms Merkel claimed that Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State who was America's National Security Adviser at the time of Mr al-Masri's alleged kidnap, had apologised for his detention.

The US Government has strenuously denied making any apology for the case. In May last year, the Justice Department invoked the rarely used state secrets privilege to have Mr al-Masri's allegations dismissed from civil court. "There is no way that the case can go forward without causing the damage to the national security," argued Assistant US Attorney, Joseph Sher.

The arrest warrants issued this week are believed to stem from information handed to German prosecutors by their Spanish counterparts three months ago.

Last October, German media reported that Spanish investigators had handed a list of about 20 names of suspected CIA agents to German prosecutors following inquiries in Mallorca, which is believed to be a staging post for dozens of secret flights. The Boeing 737 that is believed to have carried Mr al-Masri left the island on December 24, 2003.

A New York Times inquiry based on the names turned up by Spanish investigators traced 18 of them to a cluster of shared post office boxes in Virginia, near the CIA headquarters in Langley. The social security numbers held by many of the named suspects had been issued in the last five years, suggesting the use of aliases.

Thanks Walter. I pasted the wrong link. I've edited with the correct link.